Jeffrey Tigay on the Raising of the Dead in the Epic of Gilgamesh and its Sources

Many texts pre-dating the exile speak of the dead being raised back from Sheol to the land of the living, paralleling (albeit, imperfectly, the eschatological resurrection one finds in the Book of Mormon and what informs the metaphors in Ezek 37, and other texts before and during the exile).

While arguing for the possibility that some of the texts may have been interpolated, the following discussion from Jeffrey Tigay shows that pre-exilic texts, such as the Descent of Inanna affirms figures being in Sheol and then brought back to life:

Raising the Dead

In GE VI, 97-100, Ishtar, in another curse, threatens that if Anu refuses her request to send the Bull of Heaven, she will smash the doors of the netherworld and

w-[še]l-lam-ma [mī]tūti [i]k-ka-lu ba[l-ṭ]u-u-u-ti
eli bal-ṭu ti ú-šam-[a-d]u mītūti

I will raise up the dead, and they will devour the living,
I will make the dead outnumber the living!

(GE VI, 99-100, from
GSL, 121, iii, 34-36)

The latter couplet is found in Ishtar N (obv. 19-20), where it is spoken by Ishtar, and in Nergal and Ereshkigal (v, 11’-12’, 26’-27’) where it is part of a threat made by Ereshkigal, Ishar’s sister. In Gilgamesh and the Bull of Heaven, the Sumerian forerunner of GE VI, Ishar’s threat was apparently of a different nature entirely. Since the threat in GE VI deals with the realm of the dead and the parallels mentioned both appear in texts dealing with the netherworld, those texts are more plausible than Gilgamesh as the original context of the threat. Since Ishtar attributes the threat to the same goddess who utters it in GE VI, and also includes the threat to smash the doors of the netherworld, Ishtar is the more likely source for the Gilgamesh passage.

The conclusion that GE VI has borrowed the threat from elsewhere agrees with the fact that this tablet is rife with literary allusions, most relating to Ishtar. Since Gilgamesh seems to have drawn some passages from Ishtar, while Ishtar has borrowed others from Gilgamesh, the process of borrowing was probably gradual. The nature of the process is suggested by the fact that some lines appear only in some, not all of the manuscripts of the borrowing compositions: The parallel to GE VII, ii, 22 appears only in the Nineveh recension of Ishtar, and the parallel to Ishtar N obv. 11 is found in only one manuscript of GE VII, I, after line 39. This implies that not all of the parallels were put into the texts by the authors, but that some were added by later copyists. Perhaps on one occasion a copyist of Gilgamesh added a line from Ishtar. A copyist of Ishtar, perhaps many years later, borrowed another line from Gilgamesh. The process may have been repeated a few times, and in this way the number of parallels grew. (Jeffrey H. Tigay, The Evolution of the Gilgamesh Epic [Wauconda, Ill.: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 2012], 173-74)